United for Peace of Pierce County, WA - We nonviolently oppose the reliance on unilateral military actions rather than cooperative diplomacy.

Evidence is accumulating that for the first time in the history of the human race a spacecraft has left the solar system, a Houston Chronicle blog reported Saturday.[1]  --  (See especially the data in the second inset.)  --  The vehicle that has this honor, a little more than 35 years after it was launched, is Voyager 1, which left Cape Canaveral on Sept. 5, 1977, two weeks after Voyager 2 (but Voyager 1 reached Jupiter and Saturn first).  --  It was on Feb. 14, 1990, that Voyager 1 took the famous "Pale Blue Dot" photograph of Earth, from a distance of about 4 billion miles.  --  According to the Voyager site maintained by NASA's Jet Propulsion Laboratory, Voyager 1 is now some 11.4 billion miles away.  --  BACKGROUND:  As Carl Sagan recounted in Murmurs of Earth: The Voyager Interstellar Record (Ballantine Books, 1978), both of the Voyager spacecraft carry a gold-coated copper phonograph record with 118 photographs (none of artwork), a recording of 90 minutes of music, an audio essay called "The Sounds of Earth," greetings in sixty languages (Sumerian, Greek, Portuguese, Cantonese, Akkadian, Russian, Thai, Arabic, Romanian, French ["Bonjour tout le monde"], Burmese, Hebrew ["Shalóm"], Spanish ["Hola y saludos a todos"], Indonesian, Quechua, Punjabi, Hittite, Bengali, Latin, Aramaic, Dutch, German ["Herzliche grüsse an alle"] Urdu, Vietnamese, Turkish, Japanese, Hindi, Welsh, Italian ["Tanti saluti e auguri"], Sinhalese, Zulu, Sotho, Wu, Armenian, Korean, Polish, Nepali, Mandarin Chinese, Ila, Swedish, Nyanja, Gujarati, Ukrainian, Persian, Serbian, Oriya, Luganda, Marathi, Amoy, Hungarian, Telugu, Czech, Kanarese, Rajasthani, and English ["Hello from the children of the planet Earth"]), a salutation dated Jun. 16, 1977, from U.S. President Jimmy Carter (saying that his message to extraterrestrials -- that "We are attempting to survive our time so we may live into yours" -- is likely to "survive a billion years into the future"), and another salutation from U.N. Secretary General Kurt Waldheim (saying that "We step out of our solar system into the universe seeking only peace and friendship" some eight years before revelations of his World War II activities caused a scandal).  --  Lewis Thomas proposed that the complete works of Johann Sebastian Bach be sent on the Voyager spacecraft, "but that would be boasting" (Murmurs of Earth, p. 13).  --  Sagan concludes Ch. 1 of the volume with these words:  "Billions of years from now our sun, then a distended red giant star, will have reduced Earth to a charred cinder.  But the Voyager record will still be largely intact, in some other remote region of the Milky Way galaxy, preserving a murmur of an ancient civilization that once flourished -- perhaps before moving on to greater deeds and other worlds -- on the distant planet Earth" (Murmurs of Earth, p. 42)....

1.

SciGuy: A science blog

MORE EVIDENCE THAT VOYAGER HAS EXITED THE SOLAR SYSTEM
By Eric Berger

Houston Crhonicle
October 6, 2012

http://blog.chron.com/sciguy/2012/10/more-evidence-that-voyager-has-exited-the-solar-system/

Something very, very interesting is happening with Voyager 1, the human probe that’s the very farthest from Earth.

New data from the spacecraft, which I will discuss below, indicate Voyager 1 may have exited the solar system for good.  If true, this would mark a truly historic moment for the human race -- sending a spacecraft beyond the edge of our home solar system.

At last check, NASA scientists said they were not yet ready to officially declare that Voyager 1 had officially exited the solar system by crossing the heliopause.

To cross this boundary scientists say they would need to observe three things:

1.  An increase in high-energy cosmic rays originating from outside our solar system

2.  A drop in charged particles emanating from the sun.

3.  A change in the direction of the magnetic field.

As I reported in June, in regard to the first point, scientists have observed a sustained increase in galactic cosmic rays during recent months.

[INSET: VOYAGER-1 > 70 mEv/NUC IONS (6-Hour Avg) CAPTION: More galactic cosmic rays are striking Voyager 1. (NASA)]

With respect to the second point, there has been a dramatic and sustained drop in charged particles (principally protons) originating from the Sun that have struck the spacecraft.

And by dramatic, I mean dramatic.  Here’s how it looks: ( http://voyager.gsfc.nasa.gov/heliopause/heliopause/v1la1.html )

[INSET: VOYAGER-1 <0.5 MeV/nuc ions (6-Hour Avg).  CAPTION: Rate at which Voyager 1 is being bombarded by particles such as protons. (NASA).]

I have reached out to Edward Stone, the Voyager project scientist based at the California Institute of Technology, who has oversight of the mission.  He has not responded to my query about whether this means Voyager has truly exited the system.

The third question is whether the magnetic field affecting Voyager has changed.  That data is not yet definitive, said Dave McComas, a heliopause expert with the Southwest Research Institute.  “In the end, the magnetometer data will have to tell us if Voyager 1 has crossed the heliopause or the disconnection boundary,” McComas told me.

[INSET: EQUATORIAL CUT THROUGH THE HELIOSPHERE.   Schematic of the Voyagers and the heliopause. (McComas and Schwadron, ApJ)]

However Nick Suntzeff, a Texas A&M University astronomer, said based upon the stunning drop in charged particles, something is definitely happening to Voyager that NASA should be commenting upon:  “Even without the magnetometer data, the Voyager 1 data shows that it has gone through a huge barrier at the edge of the solar system.  These guys are defining it based on their theory which requires a transition zone where the magnetic fields decouple.  Maybe this is true.  But the fact remains that the satellite has gone through a discontinuity in cosmic ray fluxes that is incredible.  It is interacting with the boundary of the Solar System.  I think that the data stand on their merit -- something wonderful (a line from the movie 2010) has happened.”

Which is to say that NASA may be making an important announcement about Voyager 1 in the not too distant future.